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Moving sustainable design forward
Published in Rob Fleming, Saglinda H Roberts, Sustainable Design for the Built Environment, 2019
Rob Fleming, Saglinda H Roberts
Perhaps the most impactful scale of sustainable design can be found at the district and site scales. The difficult prospect of designing net zero energy buildings becomes much easier when the entire site and neighborhood is considered. Access to more land, more rooftops, and more infrastructure offers the best chance to pursue ambitious sustainability projects. Consideration of the district scale allows for shared collection of water and sun and shared food production. These are powerful strategies for sustainable design, but they require great leaps of thinking, cooperation, and technical innovation. Since ecodistricts are made up of diverse communities with varying goals and worldviews, the challenges are very real. Ecovillages offer a hopeful pathway as these are intentional communities that come with all the benefits of ecodistricts but more importantly offer alignment in worldview, probably the most important asset in building a sustainable community. From a resilience point of view, ecovillages can function as autonomous communities off-grid which means they can continue to function in difficult times.
Sustainable Development: How to Avoid Collapse and Build a Better Society
Published in John C. Ayers, Sustainability, 2017
Planners have developed many living models in the last 100 years to improve on our current unsustainable models for urban and suburban living. New Urbanism tries to design cities to be more pedestrian-friendly and to foster community by incorporating shared central spaces like parks.13 Sustainable cities can produce food through urban gardening techniques (Section 13.3.3) or by relying on farms just outside the city limits that deliver food to consumers at farmers’ markets. Ecovillages take a step farther by considering not only human needs but also ecosystem needs. Ecovillages are designed to have minimal environmental impact. They are sustainable, intentional communities that are self-reliant, meaning that they contain all basic services (shops, schools, clinics, churches, etc.). Ecovillages aim to increase biodiversity by incorporating organic gardening and green roofs into their design (Bates 2006). The Global Ecovillage Network14 includes close to 20,000 villages worldwide.
Making Practices in Pursuit of Ecological Ethos: Learnings from Three Ecovillages in Australia
Published in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2023
Simple living in rural communities is often associated with a home-based lifestyle. In this context, the boundaries between work and home are blurring (Leshed et al., 2014), a situation rarely discussed, unlike the work coordination studied in HCI. With a shared vision, people form ecovillages (Gilman & Gilman, 1991) for ongoing experiments in simple living. The Global Ecovillage Network defines an ecovillage as “a community that is consciously designed through locally owned, participatory processes in all four dimensions of sustainability (social, culture, ecology, and economy) to regenerate their social and natural environments” (Global Ecovillage Network, 2022c). They immerse themselves in everyday making practices by integrating fabrication, gardening, artifact making, and building their own homes. Their strategies, philosophies, and methods to work collectively with nature could enhance our understanding of sustainability. In line with emerging discussions in HCI communities, our study aims to explore a broader set of strategies, agendas, and demographics of sustainable-making practices.